economics at Kharkov University. He had been engaged in some heavy fighting round
Kiev during the previous month, until his regiment had been moved to this Smolensk
sector. He was in a gloomy mood. "It's no use pretending that all is well," he said: "The flag-waving, the hurrah-patriotism of our press are all very well for propaganda purposes to keep up morale; but it can be overdone—as it sometimes is. We shall need a lot of help from abroad. I know the Ukraine; I know how immensely important it is for our whole
national economy. Now we have lost Krivoi Rog and Dnepropetrovsk, and without the
Krivoi Rog iron ore, Kharkov and Stalino, if we don't lose them too, will find it hard to work at anything like full capacity. Leningrad, with its skilled labour, is also more or less isolated. And we just don't know how much further the Germans are going to push—with their troops already at Poltava, we may well lose Kharkov. We've been hearing for weeks about the Economic Conference that's to meet in Moscow; they say Lord Beaverbrook is on his way; I wonder what good it'll do..."
He went on: "This is a very grim war. And you cannot imagine the hatred the Germans have stirred up among our people. We are easy-going, good-natured people, you know;
but I assure you, they have turned our people into spiteful mujiks. Zlyie mujiki—that's what we've got in the Red Army now, men thirsting for revenge. We officers sometimes have a job in keeping our soldiers from killing German prisoners; I know they want to do it, especially when they see some of these arrogant, fanatical Nazi swine. I have never known such hatred before. And there's good reason for it. Think of those towns and
villages over there," he said, pointing at the red sunset over Smolensk; "think of all the torture and degradation these people are made to suffer." There was a flicker of mad hatred in his eyes. "And I cannot help thinking of my wife and my own ten-year-old daughter in Kharkov." He was silent for a time, controlling himself, and hammering one knee with his fingers. "Of course," he said at last, "there are the partisans; they are at least a personal solution to thousands of people over there. There comes a moment when people can't bear it any longer. They go off into the woods, in the hope that they may murder a German some time. Often it's like suicide; often they know that, sooner or later, they are almost sure to be caught, and to be put through all the beastliness the Germans are capable of..."
He then talked about the partisans generally, thought they were important, though not as important as they might be. And sooner or later, if the Russians went on retreating, the partisans would lose touch with their sources of supply, and would soon be short of arms.
"No doubt they can continue to carry on sabotage in a small way, and various forms of passive resistance, but they may no longer constitute a serious armed force. If only we had fully prepared the partisan movement, if only we had piled up thousands of arms
dumps throughout Western Russia. Something was done, but not nearly enough; and in
the south there are, unfortunately, no woods... "
It was during this visit to the Front that I first met Alexei Surkov, the Russian poet., who was there as a war correspondent. Later during the war we recalled those days. "Those were fearful days," he said. "Do you know that we wanted to show you people some of our tanks—well, I can now tell you, we didn't have a damned thing! "
The town of Dorogobuzh—famous before the war for its cheeses— on the banks of the
Upper Dnieper, which we reached one night, after travelling for hours along terribly muddy, bumpy roads, had been bombed by the Germans, and now nothing was left of it
but the shells of the stone and brick buildings and the chimney stacks of the wooden houses; of its 10,000 inhabitants, only about 100 people were still there. In July, in broad daylight, waves of German planes had dropped high explosives and incendiary bombs
over the town for a whole hour. There were no troops there at the time; men, women,
children had been killed—nobody knew how many.
After spending the night in an army tent outside the town—we saw the next morning
some fifty people, mostly women and some pale-looking children, lining up for food
outside an army canteen in one of the few only half-destroyed buildings of the town—we drove to Yelnya through what was now "reconquered territory". There had been heavy fighting there. The woods were shattered by shellfire; there were, here and there, large mass-graves, with crudely-painted wooden obelisks on top of them, in which hundreds of Russian soldiers had been buried. The village of Ushakovo, where some of the heaviest fighting had taken place for over a month, had been razed to the ground; and only from the bare patches along the road could one roughly imagine where the houses had stood. In Ustinovka, another village some distance away, most of the thatched roofs had been torn away by bomb blast; the people in the village had fled before the Germans came; but now there were faint signs of life again. An old peasant and two little boys had returned since the Russians had recaptured the village, and were working in the deserted fields, digging up potatoes—potatoes that had been sown long before the Germans had come. And there
was nobody else in the village, except an old woman, a blind old woman who had gone
insane. She was there when the village was shelled, and had gone mad. I saw her
wandering barefooted about the village, carrying a few dirty rags, a rusty pail and a tattered sheepskin. One of the boys said that she slept in her shattered hut, and they gave her potatoes, and sometimes soldiers passing through the village would give her
something, though she never asked for anything. She just stared with her blind white eyes and never uttered any articulate words, except the word "Cherti" —the devils.
We drove on to Yelnya, through more miles of uncut fields. Once we drove off the road into a wood, because there were three or four German planes overhead. In the wood there were Russian batteries and other signs of military activity. Yelnya had been wholly
destroyed. On both sides of the road leading to the centre of the town, all the houses—
mostly wooden houses—had been burned, and all that was left was piles of ashes and
chimney-stacks, with fireplaces some way down. It had been a town of about 15,000
inhabitants. The only building still intact was a large stone church. Most of the civilians who had been here during the German occupation had now gone. The town had been
captured by the Germans almost by surprise, and very few civilians had had time to
escape. Nearly all the able-bodied men and women had been formed into forced-labour
battalions, and driven into the German rear. A few hundred elderly people and children had been allowed to stay on in the town. The night the Germans decided to pull out of Yelnya— for the Russians were closing in, threatening to encircle the town— the
remaining people of Yelnya were ordered to assemble inside the church. They spent a
night of terror. Through the high windows of the church black smoke was pouring in, and they could see the flames. For the Germans were now going round the houses, picking up what few valuables they could find, and then systematically setting fire to every house in the town. The Russians drove into the town through the burning wreckage, and were able to release the now homeless prisoners.
In the course of this one and only visit to the Front we had talked to three German
airmen, the crew of a German bomber that had been shot down almost immediately after their raid on Viazma.
[They had just missed the house where we were staying, but had killed several people in the house across the street. The episode is described in Moscow '41.]